Following up on my previous Kynetx post, here’s a demo of how FamilyLink.com and Kynetx could reveal your relatives on WordPress blogs:

I spoke at WordCamp Utah at the end of September on using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS). Here are my slides:

WordPress as a CMS

UPDATE: Rocky Mountain Voices has a video of my presentation.

WordCamp Utah is a 1-day conference all about WordPress, to be held in Provo, Utah, on September 27, 2008. Speakers will include WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, WordPress guru Alex King, both visiting from out of town, and several local personalities including Cameron Moll, Thom Allen, Ash Buckles, and yours truly.

I’ll speak on using WordPress as a Content Management System, demonstrating that you can use WordPress software to power your website even if it’s not a blog. At our nonprofit foundation, we use WordPress to power over 40 non-blog websites.

This should be a great conference for any blogger, Web developer, or Web publisher. I’m excited to hear each of the talks.

More information: WordCamp Utah (signup)

Seth Godin has suggested that you treat new visitors to your blog differently from returning users. New users should be given context and background about you, and perhaps be invited to become permanent subscribers to your blog. Returning users should have quick access to your new material.

You could also consider turning off ads for your longtime subscribers. On one hand, you’ll forego ad revenue from a large group of people and prevent your advertisers from targeting a known group, but on the other hand, it might deepen the loyalty and increase the satisfaction of your biggest fans. Or you could do the opposite. Personally, I like the first more than the second.

For WordPress users, I wrote a WordPress plugin to do simple market segmentation. It was already the most visited page on my blog but traffic recently jumped with a link from the namesake last week. One blogger even created a graphic for it. Thanks.

Do you do any market segmentation on your blog or website? Where do you make the split, and how is the experience different?

Five months ago I created a WordPress plugin to implement a marketing principle taught by Seth Godin. He said good marketers “treat returning visitors differently than newbies”. The plugin has been one of the most popular features on my blog.

Today I upgraded the plugin to version 1.3, adding a feature that allows the welcome message to be displayed permanently if desired.

For more information, read about the What Would Seth Godin Do plugin for WordPress.

If you’re a marketer or a WordPress user, you might like the WordPress plugin I recently created. Based on a principle taught by Seth Godin, it lets you treat new visitors to your site different from returning visitors:

“What Would Seth Godin Do” WordPress plugin

I recently learned about MicroID, a microformat for verifying ownership of content on web pages, from a post on Phil Windley’s blog. MicroID, which is a simple hash of an email address and a URL, can be used to claim ownership of a blog, a blog post, or a blog comment.

Phil developed a MicroID plugin for MovableType.

Likewise, I created a MicroID plugin for WordPress [zip].

This WordPress plugin does three things:

1. Inserts a MicroID meta tag in the head of your blog. This is calculated from the administrator email and the blog URL listed in your WordPress blog’s General Options.
2. Attaches a MicroID to each post. This is calculated from the email address of the author of that post (which may be different if your blog has multiple authors) and the permalink of that post.
3. Attaches a MicroID to each comment. This is calculated from the email address and URL submitted with each comment.

This a very new concept with little practical application so far, but the possibilities are interesting: “Blog comment systems can check the given email address against a MicroID from the entered home page link to help reduce link spamming and blatant spoofing.” (microid.org)